It was a question, not a statement. Big Jaap Boerman was scared of no man, yet he lived in constant fear of losing Sura Suyanto. How a grifter like him had got so lucky never ceased to amaze him. Before Sura, there was the banal brutality of a childhood in the slums of Jo’burg, petty – then violent – crime, several stints in jail, followed by five years with the French Foreign Legion in Algeria. It was a good outlet for his talents, but he’d been dishonourably discharged for beating up an officer. There followed a stint diving Nigerian oil rigs as a welder, until an overbearing foreman made him shatter the man’s skull with his bare fists. Evading justice, he made his way back down the African continent, washing up on the shark cage diving boats running out of Gansbaai.

‘The answer is no.’ She pushed away his hand. ‘Now hurry up and hide that weapon.’

‘Which one?’

At last he was rewarded with a hearty chuckle.

Ja, this is the gutsy Sura I know.

The first time he’d laid eyes on her, she was calmly staring down a six-metre great white with its snout stuck in the aluminium bars of her shark cage. The massive fish was shaking it to pieces. He’d dived in, busted it on the nose, then hauled Sura and her terrified cameraman out of there. The man had refused to go back in the water, so Sura had handed Boerman the camera. That night, she came to his dingy lodgings, made him feel something for the first time in his life. Now, Jaap Boerman could not imagine life without her.

‘Look here.’ She sat up, excited. ‘My father has sent new images of the Hoosenbeck.’

SUBJECT: Your holiday in Jayapura.

Thought these might help with the documentary.

Ayah.

The high-resolution shots were taken from an Indonesian EADS CASA C-295 at 1500 metres. The detail was far superior to the satellite photos, and they greedily pored over key features of the terrain. The three crooked arms of the gorge had been formed by many millennia of snowmelt through a sheer escarpment more than a kilometre high. At some point in the distant past, the river and waterfall that had sculpted the gorge had vanished atop the escarpment down a vertical shaft, which appeared in the photo as a ragged black slot.

‘Unbelievable,’ Boerman breathed. ‘It just swallows the river.’

‘A geological path of least resistance,’ Sura mused. ‘The subterranean river has carved out the giant cavern and the lake within.’

‘The perfect hiding spot for a submarine.’

‘But surely the Dutch should have found signs of a vessel that large?’ With her jet-black fringe low over her eyes, Sura scrolled downstream, peering intently at the twists and turns of the gorge, where deep shadows masked possible hidden caverns. ‘The diary entries are infuriatingly vague on the last days of the I-403’s voyage.’